by Rudy Rucker
Utopias have a way of blinding you to the real present, though, so let's draw back from that. Let me tell you about what I saw some REAL machines do. Fellow freestyle SF writer Marc Laidlaw took me and the family to a Survival Research Labs show held under a freeway in San Francisco. It was terrific, a mad swirl of politics and collaged machinery, with a giant flamethrower that seemed continually about to explode, a pile of burning pianos, a giant metal arm poking at the pianos, and so on. After the show, my son and I found a heap of what seemed to be unexploded dynamite - clayey substance packed into an officially printed wrapper saying "FRONT LINE DEMOLITION PURPOSES ONLY", and with a long fuse. My son and I love fireworks. We tried lighting one, but it didn't go off. We were spending the night at the Laidlaws' apartment in Haight-Ashbury. Audrey kept saying that it was too dangerous for
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us to keep the dynamite, that it was unstable and might go off. After some thought I agreed. So how were we to throw it away? Laidlaw didn't exactly want it in his kitchen trashcan, so he and I went outside to ditch the dynamite. The sidewalks of Haight-Ashbury are crawling with homeless stoners every hour of the night and day, and we didn't want them to get hold of the dynamite, so we couldn't just leave it on the curb. The public trashcans were out of the question, as some Haighties practically LIVE in the trashcans - you throw something in a trashcan and there's a guy inside the can to catch it. Finally we found a church with a metal grating over the entrance. We pushed the dynamite through there out of reach. A few days later I saw an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a rash of "fake dynamite" being found all over the city. It had all been a mind game that was part of the Survival Research Labs show. The show had kept going on for several days, as it were, and the Establishment's Spectacle had been (ever so slightly) taken over and co-opted by Marc Pauline.
The reality is that there is no unifying Great Work, there are just a lot of people here in the pit together, slamming and hacking. Our Great Work is to stay in the pit, to control our own destinies, and to hack what we can of the world. There are no nations in the pit, no us against them, and the Japanese are not our enemies. Recently Audrey and I went to Japan where I was to appear on a cyberspace panel along with hacker Jaron Lanier and some others. Queen Mu of Mondo 2000 was there as well, as chance would have it. After our talks we were invited to the Gold Disco where a Mr. Takemura was putting on his monthly show. His show is a series of collaged videos he makes, also lighting effects, smoke clouds and scent clouds, and fast acid-house disco. The video show is a mélange consisting of (1) the chaotic pattern you get by pointing a TV camera at a monitor in a feedback loop, the key thing being, as Santa Cruz chaos mathematicians discovered, to have the camera upside down, (2) gay porno films of men kissing and dicks with studs and rings, (3) dolphins and politicians in black and white d) screens from the new Sim Earth computer game, (4) SIGGRAPH style computer graphics. Standing with Mr. Takemura and Jaron by the disco control panel, and the Japanese kids dancing like crazy, vogueing, some of them in bathing
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suits, a geisha off there somewhere, the video projected on seventeen different screens, Sim Earth going by, Mr. DataGlove right next to me - I get this really heavy flash that the New Edge really IS happening, it matters to these people here, it is going to happen, and we're all hanging out at the surfin' edge. Right then Mr. T. takes my arm and leads me off to a corner of the room, past the guy in the bathing suit, past the beautiful Japanese girl in the high shorts, and there on a PC monitor is . . . my own program CA Lab! The "Rug" rule, boiling away, bopping right to the beat as the casual viewer might think, my program running live here in the coolest disco in Tokyo. Hallelujah, my information had made it this far on its own. I'd GOTTEN OVER, as the brothers say.
And that thought sets off the flash that none of us hackers or writers or rappers or samplers or mappers or singers or users of the tech is in it solely for the Great Work - no, us users be here for our own good. We work for the Great Work because the work is fun. The hours are easy and the pay is good. And the product we make is viable. It travels and it gets over. And if you help make a piece of it, then that piece is part of you. You're part of the thang.
Now what exactly IS this Great Work which is taking place on the New Edge? We are not given to truly know WHAT IT IS. The Great Work is like a Mandelbrot Set of which we are the pixels, or even the steps of the computation. The Great Work is like a living body in which you and I are like a cell, or even like a specific chemical process, like an enzyme which copies ten thousand rungs of DNA. The Great Work is so big that nobody alive can even put a name on it. In a few hundred years they can look back and say what it was, but here inside it, nobody can see. It has something to do with people getting more and more mixed up with machines, it has to do with do-it-yourself, it has to do with sampling and collaging, it has to do with the end of the old style of politics. A wave of revolution is sweeping all of Planet Earth. Incredibleness: the Soviet Union is no more. How many more years can it be until the revolution comes back here to the United States, back to where it started? To reduce it to a bumper sticker: "IF THE RUSSIANS CAN GET RID OF THE COMMUNISTS, THE AMERICANS CAN GET RID OF THE REPUBLICANS!" Pass it on. Surely the ever-esca-
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lating rape of the environment, the crazy wastage of the "drug war," the warmongering, the elitist selfishness, surely this will someday come to an end - blown away perhaps by the onslaught of total New Edge information? Maybe soon.
Let's follow the Great Work and see.
Appeared as "Introduction: On the Edge of the Pacific" in Mondo
2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge, HarperCollins, 1992.
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Vision in Yosemite
One long weekend in August, 1992, my son "Tom" and I went backpacking in Yosemite. The trip was utterly wonderful. The first day was Thursday, we got a late unhassled start from San Jose, and drove up to Tuolomne Meadows, getting there about 6:00 PM. We got a Wilderness Pass for free from a ranger-girl in a booth in the parking lot, we'd been worrying about getting the pass, but if you are willing to backpack to at least four miles from the road, you can just walk on in. We've been here in CA for six years, and I used to try and get reservations at the (actually quite shitty, I now realize!) Curry Company campgrounds at Tuolomne Meadows, and there would never be a spot available, even if you called in February for next July. But if you're willing to backpack in with all your food and your tent for at least four miles, why then, brother, you can stay wherever you dang please. Simply treat the wilderness well and leave it as you found it. And now, finally, thanks to the energy of my son, we were able to do it. I used our old frame pack, he used his new internal frame pack, he bought a bunch of dehydrated food and a miniature alcohol stove, we used light old "Pup," the pup-tent we bought the kids in Lynchburg grade school, and we each have a down sleeping bag and cheap sponge-rubber sleeping mat. The High Sierras at last!
So Thursday night, Tom and I are a little worried about how we are going to get four miles off the road before the dusk of 89 PM, and also which way we, um, are actually going to be going. "Which trailhead?" the ranger-girl asks. "Do you have any recommendations?" "We're not allowed to recommend." "Which is less crowded?" ''This is Yosemite in August." So first we say Cathedral Lake south of Tuolomne and towards Yosemite Valley, and then we change our minds and go back and get the pass changed to Glen Aulin north of Tuolomne, and then as we hike towards Glen Aulin we find the path too used-looking, deep and padded with sand, and what the hey, branch off towards the Young Lakes six miles north and 2,000 feet up.
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The Young Lakes trail is deliciously deserted, but there is no way we are going to make it up there before it finishes getting dark. We spot a stream on the map and hike that far, then head up the stream a few hundred yards into genuine wilderness. Reassuringly, there is a fire-ring back in the woods near the stream, we pitch camp there, rapidly and anxiously, as night falls fast. There's a gib
bous moon making silvery shadows in the empty woods around us. In the dark, the complicated alcohol stove won't work, but we get a campfire going - it keeps away the spooky moonshadows - heat up some water, mix it with dried Wild Tyme turkey dinner, the water isn't very hot but we are very hungry, we eat dry food mix in puddled spicy water, the fire dies down, we get the food hung from a tree branch with a counter-balance in the prescribed Yosemite bear-bag method (described in detail in our Yosemite guide). We sleep peacefully and wake up alone in the woods, with beautiful riffles of water sliding down the granite bed of the stream.
That day we make it up to Young Lakes, we find an isolated campground with another stream all to ourselves. Reading some info in our Yosemite guidebook, I find that the giant domes of granite that make up these mountains are called "plutons" after Pluto, not the dog but the god of the underworld. The plutons are immense balls of magma that froze up far beneath the surface of the Earth and eventually got pushed upwards. What makes the Yosemite granite so remarkable is that its filled with big chunks of quartz, scattered in like pineapple cubes in a fruitcake.
That night the bears hit us. I knew it was coming, sort of, as I'd hung the food rather low on a comic-book-silhouette of a pine tree right behind the tent. At 4 AM or so I hear the bag hit the ground and give out a great yell of warding-off and sheer terror. I get my shoes on, run outside, the white bag of the food is on the ground, but it's too dark to see the bear, I'm terrified, I yell - obscenities are inadequate in this situation, instead I yell things like YAH - grub up a rock and throw it towards the grunting or gobbling sound of the bear over there in the dark. Tom comes out with our candle lantern and extra candles. He lights a candle on the rock under the bent Donald Duck dead sapling pine that I'd tied the Barks bag to. The candle on the Yosemite pluton looks like something from The
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Exorcist. This is very creepy. I feel at the torn food bag, "The salami is gone," I cry, "The salami is all gone!" But I hoist the remaining food up to the tip of the sapling again. Meanwhile there is frost on everything. Pup is sagging down to touch us, stiff with ice. In the dark, one waits for the sun to return as one would wait for a returning god. Blessed sleep doth knit up the raveled sleeve of care. At seven AM the first ray of sun strikes me getting out of the tent. Not only is Tom's salami safe in the bag, the clean tail end of my half of the salami is in the grass, not dented by bear tooth. Next to it is Tom's Powerbar and his bag of gorp, gorp chewed open, all chocolate gone, then another Powerbar. The two remaining freeze-dried dinners are intact, and so are the dried eggs. Victory! We won! We kept our meat! Actually Tom cared more about the Powerbars than he did about the salami, the salami was just my obsession.
After salami and eggs for breakfast, we left the packs in our camp and did an amazing tour of Ragged Peak Saddle, the Teeth of Death, Quartz Pipe, Hyper Young Lake Above Upper Young Lake, Fresh Bear Shit, Wrong Valley, Compass Reading, Home, The Fort, all quite incredibly Alpine, more Alpine than the Zermatt of today (lacking, il faut dire) the Matterhorn and the 15,000 foot peaks. On our map and compass tour, Tom and I peaked at 11,200 feet, on a level with northeastward-stretching sea of High Sierras and with the Cathedral Range to the south. The peak was of plutonic granite that had weathered into spars and disks. Each of us climbed a separate tooth, instead of having to perhaps muscle the other one aside, both of us wanting to beat the other one, but loving and wanting to defer, but really wanting to beat . . . We each climbed our own fins. Getting down, I said to Tom, "It was nice that we each had our own peak to be on. Of course mine was just a bit higher, but - "
"Mine was higher!"
That night we made our dehydrated Shrimp Cantonese just right with the now highly effective alcohol stove. We had a tiny cooking pan, a flat eating pan and two spoons. Plus two salamis and the baggies of gorp and the Powerbars. Our filter-pumper has several pieces: an oddjob porcelain filter that's inside a blue polystyrene barrel, a white syringe-like pump, and three soft rubber hoses that run from stream to pump, from pump to filter, and from filter to water-
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bottle, the removable hoses wedged onto ridged nipples. It's so unwieldy that it takes both of us to use it, but it's a thrill to confidently drink the water from a stream.
We bear-bag the food really well this time, in a position nearly matching the Yosemite guide-mandated dimensions of 12' off the ground, 10' from the trunk, 5' from the branch. The night before on our Donald Duck tree it had been 7' from the ground with the bent dead pine too spiny to mount. So the bear had reached 7' up in the air and I'd been yelling at him in my T-shirt, glasses, and sandals? Not this night, no thanks, we hung the food high, and the frost didn't even come down and we slept like babies.
Sunday morning at 7 AM I'm up to greet the dear sun. I get dressed in my short-sleeved thick cotton dark-blue-with-snaky-paisley shirt, my tan wool V-neck sweater, my mole-colored knickers with the Velcro fastenings, my cotton-lined nylon defective Polo windbreaker from on sale at N.Y. Macy's, my blue cotton socks and my mountain boots from Zermatt like 20 years ago, 1972, the year Tom was born. He's still fast asleep, I wake him for a second to tell him I'll be back in an hour, like he cares, and I head cross-country up the stream that leads from Lower Young Lake to Middle Young Lake, and then up a grassy ramp to Upper Young Lake. I see one bear-bag on a tree up here, I skirt around it, around another fold in the Valley and here I am alone alone alone, not a sound in the sky, I am here at the shore of a beautiful glacial lake. "Take off your clothes and swim," says a mind voice. I wade in, delicately rupturing virgin sediment, then slump forward into the breast-stroke. The water was acceptably tepid. I rubbed my pits, butt and hair in the water, got into the depth, swam underwater 10 feet deep then surged up in terror tic of potential tentacled death-monster beneath the world of air.
I was born again in that water. I got out and looking at a feldsparchunked granitic pluton I realized Rocks Are Alive. I'd always drawn a line in the past, sort of a time-scale chauvinist, right, with only plants and animals alive. But now after the Ragged Peaks hike with Tom, where he found an amazing crystal well, a disk that was the surface cross-section of an ancient volcanic heat-tube vent on the side of the plutonic exfoliating granite we'd clumb, and after all the amazing chunky knobs in the speened surfaces, look dude, Rocks Are Alive.
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So now I fully had the web vision of Nature. In the past, like everyone, I'd learned to see the plant/animal ecology as a web. And on my own I'd come to think of the air as alive since it is eternally performing a programmable analog vortex computation. But I'd never thought of rock as alive, and now looking at these rocks, these rocks are as alive as college-student Green Party solicitors at your door, these rocks are like down with the program.
I've always known All is One in a bloodless intellectual's way but now, bathed in the live pellucid waters of Upper Young Lake, drying off on the cotton lining of my red coat, I saw how very wonderfully and precisely our web of Life doth adorn the curves of Mother Earth. Everything reaching out to each other - the plants the water the rocks the animals the air and even humankind - us not as spoilers but as thinkers, as pattern makers. The plants are pattern makers, too, the rodents peeping and darting are pattern makers . . . but why and wherefore? What causes and what senses the patterns? I scan and reject my beloved tricks of physics and math - these ideas aren't everything, they're only human beauty, only the ferns and flowers that grow, no, math isn't the answer, math is part of the pattern that is the question: Why?
I ponder this down the boulder-rodent-stag-water-air-moss-shrub-grass-soil-filled ramp towards The Fort and our campsite. Here is all this fabulously interlaced organic God-like beauty of Nature and why? I turn and stare at the sun, close my eyes, raise my hands, and
Love
Love is the force that grows the world. Love and beauty. Everything is beautiful because everything loves to be beautiful. All of us in the web of Life love each other, we love to churn out better patterns for the
others in the web to love.
God is Love
Tom and I hiked cross-country around Ragged Peak and over the hoof-lands to Dog Dome and the car, I thought I'd lost my keys and then had the joy of finding them in a recess of my pack. We hadn't seen ourselves in mirrors for three days and each of us thought his own self looked terrible in the car mirror but that the other one looked fine. Like you only really criticize your own appearance. We
